Addiction Self Help

Clinic helps those with worst Internet addictions

"I missed school so I could play computer games," Choi told The Korea Herald, nervously avoiding eye contact.

Choi, who declined to give his full name, has been playing online computer games since he was a little child, but things took a turn for the worse three years ago.

Once his mother caught wind of Choi's addiction, she tried everything to limit his playing, and resorted to taking away the family computer when leaving him unattended.

One afternoon, Choi, overcome by a sudden urge to play, punched through the window of his parents' bedroom, in the hope that his monitor was locked up inside.

The monitor was not there, and Choi's arms, cut on the glass, were gushing blood.

Choi tried to clean up the pools of blood, but his mother came home to what seemed like a desperate cry for help.

But in one of the most wired countries in the world stories like Choi's are not unheard of, nor is his the most serious case to have been reported.

Last year, parents addicted to online gaming neglected their 3-month-old daughter, eventually leading to her death. Sadly, this was not the first case of parental neglect from online gaming leading to the death of an infant here.

At the Gongju National Hospital in South Chungcheong Province, the Save Brain Clinic is working to rehabilitate Choi and others like him, case by case.

Lee Jae-won, head of the nation's first specialized Internet addiction clinic, has seen first hand the physical effects that Internet addiction has on the brain.

"We can detect a lot of abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex part of the brain in Internet addicts," said Lee, showing images of the brain that were clearly different from brains of people who were not addicted.

Lee added that no matter how complicated a computer game may be, it only stimulates a minute part of the brain.

But with Internet addiction emerging as a relatively new field, many experts agree there is no set or simple cure.

At the Save Brain Clinic, Lee has three main methods of treatment; medication, non-medication and rehabilitation.

"Nothing is more effective in returning the brain's functionality than medication," Lee said.

Lee, noting the similarities between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Internet addiction, decided to use transcranial magnetic stimulation, a technique used to treat those with ADHD.

Addiction: Night (Oprah's Book Club)

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night , a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life’s essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel’s lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

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